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As the years roll by and Adobe product versions keep climbing, programs such as Adobe Illustrator have increasing numbers of new and improved features that add to the total feature set of the program. With a lot of us using just a portion of these powerful programs for our everyday tasks, I wanted to showcase some of the hidden gems in Illustrator and bring them to the light of day.

Some of these hidden gems are found in previous versions of Illustrator, and I’ll point out if it’s in CS6 only or not. My hope is that you pick up a few gems that can make your time in Illustrator more productive.

Interface Hidden Gems

You’ll find many great shortcuts and useful features in the Illustrator interface, including the following:

Dock tools (new in
CS6): If you click
and hold down the mouse
button on a tool in the
Tools panel, such as the Rectangle
tool, you’ll see other
hidden tools appear, right?
Well, position the pointer
over the arrow on the right
edge of the hidden tools
and then release the mouse
button to tear off the panel
of tools. You can then drag
the tools by the title bar
to any drop zone near an existing
panel dock and dock it
in the workspace (see Figure
1).

Change the color of
the UI and other useful
preferences (new in CS6):
Choose Edit > Preferences > User
Interface (Windows) or
Illustrator > Preferences > User
Interface (Mac OS) to open
the Preferences dialog
box. Change the Brightness
of the UI by dragging the
slider or choosing an option
from the Brightness menu.

In the same User Interface
options of the Preferences
dialog box, you can select
White in the Canvas Color option
to make the area around the
artboards white (CS5 and earlier).
Don’t
like how Illustrator opens
documents as tabs? Deselect
Open Documents As Tabs in
the same settings (see Figure
3).

Hide panels using
keyboard shortcuts:
Press the Tab key to hide
all panels, and press Shift+Tab
to hide just the panels
docked on the right. Press
any of the shortcuts again
to toggle. Press the F
key several times to toggle
between the full screen modes.
To navigate to the next document,
press Ctrl+` (Windows)
or Cmd+` (Mac OS). To navigate
to next document group,
press Ctrl+Alt+` (Windows)
or Opt+Cmd+` (Mac OS).